This film received harsh reviews, and disappeared
quickly. It's a shame. While not a masterpiece, Cletis Tout is an unfairly
overlooked little gem, which many of you may find appealing.

Richard Dreyfuss is seen in prison. He was once a professional illusionist
who turned into a criminal mastermind. Imagine
David Copperfield using his detailed illusions for criminal gain. For
example, Dreyfuss robs a bank in broad daylight, but has an air-tight
alibi. He was seen performing in the courtyard outside the bank during the robbery,
in full view of hundreds of people. It's a pretty cool premise, and
the same ingenuity engineers a comical, daring prison break.

Christian Slater plays an imprisoned
forger who helps Dreyfuss break out of the big house. In his own former criminal career, Slater was
also a
genius in his field. He had managed to devise a perfect false
documents scam. His partner was a coroner. The coroner would
frequently determine an identification for an anonymous body but would
officially claim it was unidentifiable, passing the true ID along only
to Slater, who then used that identity to create a perfect set of
false documents for someone else, confident that the real owner would
never come along to blow anyone's cover. Sweet!

After their prison break, Slater and Dreyfuss contact the coroner, who sets
them up with the identities of recent corpses, but there is a major snag.
Slater takes on the ID of a guy who was hit by the mob. When the
underworld guys accidentally get wind of Slater's presence, they think their
successful hit was not so successful after all, and they bring in their
#1 hit man, Critical Jim (Tim Allen), to finish the task.

Critical Jim soon has Slater tied up in a hotel
room, and is waiting for the mob to pay him before he finishes the kill.
Luckily for Christian Slater, the mob guys are a little slow in making
the transfer to Critical Jim's bank account, so the two men use the
time to swap stories.

Slater points out that he's not who Jim thinks, and
tells his whole story from the prison break up until that point.

That story also involves millions of dollars worth of
diamonds which had been hidden by Dreyfuss before he was arrested, and
a budding romance between Slater and Dreyfuss's daughter (Portia de Rossi). As you can guess from the presence of lost diamonds, two
lovers, a bunch of mob guys, an army of cops, and four criminal masterminds (the two cons,
the coroner, and Critical Jim), the
scheming can get very elaborate.

NUDITY REPORT

there is a naked female corpse in the morgue

That all sounds contrived, doesn't it? On paper, it
sounds too complicated, and it seems to cross over into too many
unrelated genres. It's a caper picture, it's a farce, it's a romantic
comedy, and it's a flamboyant Tarantinoesque crime story. It also
uses a circular narrative, ala Tarantino, to present the already complicated story,
using flashbacks within flashbacks, making it all so convoluted you
need a program to score the game.

To make matters worse, the romantic pairing between
Christian Slater and Portia de Rossi doesn't work at all.

Despite all that, I found the movie very engaging.
It has a big heart, Billy Connelly is hilarious as the coroner, and Tim Allen is a hoot as Critical Jim, the hit
man who is also a film geek. The script uses Critical Jim's love of
films to comment on the story which Slater tells him. Since the story
which Slater relates to Critical Jim is also the plot of this film,
Critical Jim is also being critical of the very film in which he is
also a character. By the end of the film, Jim loves Slater's story,
believes it, and most important, thinks it could make a good movie.
Therefore, he can't kill Slater, because ... well, because Slater is
the good guy.

In a sense, Cletis Tout is to caper films as Scream
is to horror movies. It uses Critical Jim's voice to tell you what a
genre fan should have expected at any given time, and why it did or
didn't happen in this particular movie.

Despite some flaws, I found it consistently
charming, warm, and sometimes very funny.

A bomb! It never reached as many as fifty theaters, and
grossed only $250,000 altogether.

The meaning of the IMDb
score: 7.5 usually indicates a level of
excellence equivalent to about three and a half stars
from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm
watchability, comparable to approximately two and a half stars
from the critics. The fives are generally not
worthwhile unless they are really your kind of
material, equivalent to about a two star rating from the critics.
Films rated below five are generally awful even if you
like that kind of film - this score is roughly equivalent to one
and a half stars from the critics or even less,
depending on just how far below five the rating
is.

My own
guideline: A means the movie is so good it
will appeal to you even if you hate the genre. B means the movie is not
good enough to win you over if you hate the
genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an
open mind about this type of film. C means it will only
appeal to genre addicts, and has no crossover
appeal. (C+ means it has no crossover appeal, but
will be considered excellent by genre fans, while
C- indicates that it we found it to
be a poor movie although genre addicts find it watchable). D means you'll hate it even if you
like the genre. E means that you'll hate it even if
you love the genre. F means that the film is not only
unappealing across-the-board, but technically
inept as well.

Based on this description, C+. One of the better comedies of the year,
although you never heard of it, and the critics hated it